The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Best Best Dressed of 2025

This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 8 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2025.

Merrick’s next selection for the best of 2025 is from FishWife by Alysse McCanna (Black Lawrence Press, 2024).

Content Warning: sexual violence

Kissing Angelina

             from Belfast

She whispers bastard in my ear, her hands cupped tight,
breath hot, forbidden. I know a few swear words

and this one feels hollow, blank, but when mom says
That’s not a nice name to call someone, I know it’s a bad one,

it’s got weight. I keep it in my pocket for later when a boy
snakes his hand up my dress. For when a man presses too close

in the elevator. Say it in someone’s dark garage in high school.
Say it in the basement of the library. Say it to my husband.

Angelina has it in her pocket all along: embedded
in her hip bone, a quick-draw curse for her father,

her brother, her brother’s friends, friends’ brothers,
and the men who blew up the hair salon

where her best friend sat, spinning in a chair,
hair curled for communion.

Later, after the world has lifted its skirt to me and bared
its dark weapons, I will see a photo of her

and her daughter, still a baby, toothless and clean,
words slipping off her skin smooth as milk.

But for now, we will say the word over and over.
It tastes like smoke, spice, smells like Angelina’s

breath when it is close to my face in the bedroom
where midnight falls down around us

like so much pipe bomb shrapnel,
a girl’s soft hair, a girl’s parted lips.

Alysse Kathleen McCanna is the author of FishWife (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). Her poetry has appeared in North American Review, The Rumpus, Poet Lore, TriQuarterly, and other journals. Alysse’s chapbook Pentimento won the 2017 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. Her work has been supported by the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Tucson Festival of Books, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She holds a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University, an MFA from Bennington College, and serves as Associate Editor of Pilgrimage Magazine. Alysse is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado Mountain College in the Vail Valley.

Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality,BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, Puerto del Sol, ANMLY, Fruitslice, among others. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.